Hedcut is an artistic technique for expressing a target by arranging dots or lines having different sizes at fixed intervals according to a feature flow of the target to be portrayed. Hedcut has been developed to emulate the look of woodcuts, and is widely used to portray portraits in print media such as newspapers, magazines, or the like. Because a target is portrayed by dots or lines in hedcut, hedcut has an attractive style and is utilized in various fields other than print media. However, because much time is required when a few artists manually generate hedcuts, it is difficult for this hedcut generation method to be widely used.
As features of the hedcut, dots or lines having different sizes are used to express a tone of a target, the dots or lines are arranged along a feature direction, the arranged dots or lines are placed at intervals to a fixed extent, and the dots and lines are mixed in one hedcut image without a sense of incongruity. There is no hedcut generation method satisfying the above-described features in the related art, and studies of stippling and hatching are closely related to the hedcut generation method.
However, there is a problem in that methods based on the stippling and hatching do not sufficiently satisfy the features of a hedcut generated by arranging dots or lines having different sizes in a feature direction and placing the arranged dots or lines at intervals to a fixed extent.